


To Live In Interesting Times

by ApocalypseInspector



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Culture, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, Diplomacy, F/F, F/M, M/M, Misunderstandings, Multi, POV Outsider, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Pale-Red Vacillation, Politics, Post-Sburb/Sgrub, Species Swap, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27724958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypseInspector/pseuds/ApocalypseInspector
Summary: Things didn't go as they expected it would. The end result of winning the game is far more chaotic and unexpected than John, Jake, Dave, Roxy and Karkat expected, with a new species, diplomacy, and the double identities.Then again, that maybe isn't as bad as they think.(Or, five young adults, a first contact between two species, and conning your way to victory)
Relationships: Jake English/Karkat Vantas, John Egbert/Dave Strider, John Egbert/Roxy Lalonde/Dave Strider
Comments: 6
Kudos: 46





	1. Disclaimer

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [To Live a Normal Life? How challenging!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19338424) by [09Pyros_09Hydros](https://archiveofourown.org/users/09Pyros_09Hydros/pseuds/09Pyros_09Hydros). 



**_con (/kän/)_ **

**_verb_ **

_persuade (someone) to do or believe something, typically by use of a deception._

**« ❧ »**

_As per the orders of_ **_[_ ** **_His Noble Hurricane_ ** **_,_ ** **_Inheritor of The Second Reign_ ** **_, hatched and painted by the Mirrored Gods as_ ** **_Jownon Ectobe_ ** **_, serendipitous his rule may be ]_ ** _the official leader of the_ **_Epr’il Waenerd Kattas-Yorond Un Svocall_ ** _, Our Land Of Word-Yelling and Specifics, and thus of_ **_the Ewyan Empire_ ** _, I, a mere mensager, act as his voice towards the planet Earth, also known as Terra, Gaeia, etc. and, by association, of the Empire he commands._

_I, Tellus Missus, invite the_ **_United Nations_ ** _, a proclaimed "intergovernmental organization", identified by the Empire as the most responsible way to contact the many fractured governments within the planet Earth, to a peaceful interplanetary diplomatic summit between a team selected by said organization, and a team of our own. As our hosts, the Empire will let the United Nations decide the date, sometime in the next month and two weeks, have the final pick amongst the suggested locations, and also the number and designations of its members,_ **_of which the Ewyan Empire will respond in kind_ ** _, as a gesture of respect._

_In this summit, we can guarantee:_

  * _The presence of a member of the Imperial line, and of the two closest advisors of the chosen member._


  * The sharing of information regarding the group of species tentatively titled " Underlings", responsible for a recent attack on the planet Earth


  * The return of the five human adolescents (Johnson Nathaniel Egbert, David Leviathan-Lisbeth Strider, Roxanne Mary Lalonde, Jacob Jasper English, and Karkat Liev Vantas, all citizens of the governing body known as United States of America) caught up in the Underling Attack, and who were accidentally pulled along to the Imperial Fleet, with their wounds tended for and a personal apology from **[** **His Noble Hurricane** **]** given for the inconvenience.



_Per personal preference, we wish for the location to be one of the following:_

  * _Houston, Texas, United States of America_


  * (Coordinates: 29.749907, -95.358421.)


  * Washington, District of Columbia, United States of America


  * (Coordinates: 38.8951, -77.0364.)


  * New York City, New York, United States of America


  * (Coordinates: 40.730610, -73.935242)



_These are indications of preferred locations, not the list of all your options. However,_ ** _[_** ** _His Noble Hurricane_** **_]_** _requests, in name of politeness to our five teenaged guests, that it happen on the north american territory of the United States of America._

_We will wait for you to make a decision. Do not bother in trying to find a way to inform us, for_ **_we will know_ ** _when a decision is made._

_Best regards, and a wish for your lives to not be bothered by the_ **_Big Empty Fucking Nameless Thing_ ** _,_

_The Intergalactic Ewyan Empire of Epr’il Waenerd Kattas-Yorond Un Svocall._

_(Addendum: We apologize for any possible vulgarity, since the sample size we had to make the translator was limited, and thus, some concepts might not fully translate to english.)_

**[Transcript of the "Ewyan Invite", given attached to its original audio message]**


	2. Side A - Part 1

  
  


**_co·coon (/kəˈko͞on/)_ **

**_noun_ **

_ a silky case spun by the larvae of many insects for protection in the pupal stage. _

**« ❧ »**

When John wakes up, he thinks, for a single second, that he's five again and hiding on a cupboard for a prank that isn't worth it. He doesn't even  _ remember  _ what the prank was going to be. What he does remember, though, is how dark and  _ cramped _ it was. How every little shift just made him more uncomfortable, how the contrast between wood and the metal from the pans, always uncertain, made him squirm and cry and have to be pulled out by his dad.

Now? Now, besides the mish and mash of textures, besides the dark with only a few tiny holes of light peeking through, besides being in somewhere far too small for him, dunked in some slimy, sticky substance he barely breathes through, there's also ropes of a thick  _ something _ between his limbs. His joints, really, although the ropes get thinner there, snapping with a satisfying sound of audible stretching and ripping with barely a few flexes of his fingers.

It prompts… something. Not something that could be called conscious thought, but it's what overpowers his actions only a second later. It's instinct, both millennia-ancient and minutes-old, overwhelming in how it becomes single-minded before he's even really aware of it:

_ I have to get out of here _ .

A pause. Barely enough for it to sink in. It sounds like a good idea, he considers, and it's almost pleasant. Then it turns too frantic, desperate, a constant rhythm of _I have to get out of here_. _I have to get out of here_ _I have to get out of here_ _I have to get out of here_ _I_ ** _have_** _to_ ** _get_** _out_ ** _of_** _here_ -

He moves. He  _ fights _ , really, except not, because there isn't anyone for him to fight in here, except there's some _ thing _ , and the something that he fights only makes his movements more erratic and his fight more intense, make him more  _ desperate. _

John doesn't even realize, really, when the few holes get lighter, consequence of sharp fingers and desperate movement. He does, however, realize it when he  _ falls _ , the soft but sturdy walls of what held him ripping, leaving him to collapse, to his chin and chest to slam on a cold, grey floor with a metallic  _ thud _ .

He breathes. The slime sits heavily in his lungs. He coughs, and the impeccably cleaned floor isn't as impeccably cleaned as before, stained with pale goo and blood that seems ever so slightly off-shade. (Should it be fuchsia?  _ Shouldn't _ it be fuchsia? He doesn't know, and his head is being split open with disorientation and pain, and none of the other colors even look  _ right _ -)

He sees someone entering. He smells their surprise, their shock, their  _ relief _ , and it's such a pleasantly sharp smell that it would have knocked him on his hands and knees, if he wasn't already in that position.

" _ My- _ " They  _ trill _ , and  _ chirp _ and make a thousand other noises that shouldn't mend into words. His ears ring as they keep speaking, each combination of sounds feeling like a baseball bat to his  _ horns _ \- to his head, does he  _ even have _ horns?  _ He better have, they're him and _ , no, no,  _ what? _

He moves his hands up with a pained roar. They brush against something  _ sticky _ and hard and impossibly soft at the same time, and he feels the side of his cheek suddenly touch something  _ cold _ , before he moves to fluffy, silken hair ( _ fur _ ), then upwards, and, distantly, he smells embarrassment as he touches hardy,  _ comfortingly _ numb  _ horns _ .

The someone ( _ The Panacea _ , something in him murmurs with fondness and respect and  _ familiarity _ ) quietens. His head turns blissfully unhurt once again, which doesn't last long, because the  _ someone-Panacea-ally-stranger-mine-not mine- _ **_someone_ ** , because the someone gasps and chokes on their breath when he moves his hands further up his horns, which tugs at  _ yet another sense _ of John's- except, he realizes, in the familiar, soothing way that using his breath powers does.

He takes a deep gulp of air. He  _ breathes _ , once again, and when he coughs, just slime comes out. His head feels clearer. Less split up. Enough for him to actually  _ understand _ the words that the someone says, especially when they cradle him up to his feet.

"- _ damnit _ , brat- my brat of an emperor, most reckless of all fishfolk, who even decided that leaving you alone during molt was a good idea-" the voice is raspy, grumbling, and, most of all, familiarly worried. Their grip is surprisingly gentle, as they hoist him by the sides of his torso, adjusting it with every little gasp and whine of pain John makes.

He feels the tips of his horns scrape  _ something _ , as he raises his head to look at them. The answer he provides, slurred out even in just a single word, makes absolutely no sense even if he knows it's true: "Me."

They pause. Give barely enough time for John to observe their arching horns, blue fading on beige at the blunt tips, the short braid tossed over the shoulder that reaches slightly past their collarbone. Then, they curl their lips, press them in a thin line, and speak, quietly.

"You know that how much you take care of the empire and how much you take care of yourself shouldn't be inversely parallel, don't you?"

John laughs, short and sweet and grating on his own ears, and ignores them by whining out what he wants to say "...Doc, my head  _ hurts _ . Real fuckin', uh, real fucking bad."

It earns him a hand gently palming around the back of his head. Pulling hair aside to look better at his horns, never actually properly touching them. It makes John feel oddly grateful.

"... There doesn't seem any physical reasons for a headache-" They pause. Squint at the torn remains of what had supported John, at the slime mixed with fuchsia-red-but-not-really-either-in-his-eyes blood. At the slime mixed with blood. Their voice softens.

"... Probably just sensory overload from your new eyes."

What they say makes sense at the same time it doesn't. John doesn't know how his eyes can be "new", but he also knows that they  _ are _ , and that what they say is probably correct, even if he doesn't know  _ why _ .

It makes him groan again, and earns him a gentle huff from- from  _ Pannie _ ( an acceptable compromise, he suposes, and, as the deep lumbering thing on him knows, going to annoy the  _ shit _ out of them .)

"Come on, Emperor." They finish hoisting him up. His legs shake, ever so slightly "On your feet."

He manages to stand. They hesitantly let him go, and although his knees bend, by a bit (by a lot), he manages to straighten them again, and it earns him a look of approval that compensates for the aching hip.

Pannie lets John have a few minutes to stand, and then, they ask:

"Can you walk?"

John doesn't realize they said anything, his eyes locked on the light coming from the open door. His blood sings, instead, and it overwhelms his ears, overwhelms his thoughts, barely held off by hesitation:

_ enemy threat to what is mine territory not mine could be mine  _ **_THEY_ ** **_TOUCHED-_ **

Pannie repeats their question "Can you walk?"

John _bolts_ and **_prowls_**.

**« ❧ »**

Dave awakes up  _ bleeding _ all over himself. It's not nice.

The weight of the other Dave -  _ not doomed stable loop spin and repeat again  _ \- settles, dully, against his stomach and chest, mostly the former, as his back presses in, dyeing a part of his dark grey uniform in a bright red that shouldn't be as surprising as it is. Neither nearly as  _ warm _ as it feels.

He takes a shallow breath. Then a deeper one. Something squeezes around his legs, and he feels a limb he didn't realize he had press around fur.

Something is wrong.

He takes a shallow breath. Then a deeper one. Distantly, he hears fighting. Hears metal crashing against metal, hears crumbling walls and floors, hears the thousand (or maybe a little more) steps of a battalion moving together, frantically, to try to win. Distantly, he hears all of it  _ stop _ . Distantly, he feels as if time froze, and, distantly, he thinks he cares. Should care.

He takes a shallow breath.  _ Then _ -

Then a scratchily monotone voice ( his voice, it's his and it's not doomed, he will  _ live _ and  _ fight _ and  _ do it again _ _. _ ) says "My man, I'll take it- take it from here. Just shift."

The  Other Future Dave gets off his stomach and chest. Breathing doesn't get easier. Dave falls on his back, and he hears the ear-grating  _ clang _ of metal crashing on the ground.

Future Dave is gracious enough to show what he means by "shift". He stretches (Dave gets the feeling it's just showing off how much better his state is compared to Dave's, bleeding or not) and, as the name of the act implies, does indeed  _ shift _ . 

He grows a tail, increases his size. His skin changes, from a human tone to grey, much lighter than the almost black of Dave's uniform and tinted with red. The red of his iris expands to cover the rest of his eyes, and darkens in its original spot. Rust horns bud from the forehead, slightly down from his hair, that darken and part, adjusting to the horns as they curl around elven ears, before fading in a bright red tip.

His own had been lying against something, so gently he hadn't even realized something was amiss with them. Dave has a bad (neutral, really, or apathetic) feeling about what the "something" is.

Dave does opposite of what Future Dave ( _ Dabeth _ , he is  _ Dabeth _ ) did. His skin gets color back in, he gets tinier, he physically feels his horns shrink. He curls up in the ground as Future Dave gets up and fight.

The sounds return. The battalion continues its frantic dance as if it was never stopped in the first place, and Future Dave joins them as if that's what he was meant to do all along. Distantly, Dave feels the satisfaction of witnessing a well-oiled machine with all its cogs and cranks and wires in their correct place.

Bit by bit, swing by swing, shot by shot, the battalion wins. Dave feels an spark of unexplained pride that is almost close enough to not be really distant. Then it dies down, and time passes in a pace he doesn't care to ask, and he has someone's stocky arms getting him up.

He thinks he almost hears something, on the corner of his ears. Something that could almost be an:

_ I'M SORRY _ .

It feels unnecessary.

**« ❧ »**

Karkat hates the medbay, if only by how fond he instinctively is of it.

It doesn't smell like his hive. His hive had been something- almost sterile, in how the only troll scent that filled it had been his. It was too much space, he thought back then, even if he knew it was actually a tiny and decrepit thing. It was empty, too, only filled with gifts he will not admit to have had spent weeks smelling just for an scrap of his friends' scent, and old, stolen furniture that caused him to hiss at them for weeks when they first got there.

The medbay, instead, smells like sixteen different trolls- sixteen different  _ fae _ , he had to remember, whose names he can recall at the drop of a hat. The most present scent, of course, is the Panacea's - but only because they've been there the longest. The rest of it is a distinctive mix of the other sixteen, and a mess of weak scents belonging to other crew members that don't last past the door to the lounge. ( A lounge he wishes to enter, right now. To see the board creatively titled  _ What Will Make Karkel Flip The Fuck Out Today _ , and give Histol his well deserved point for having bet on the scratched out board marked as  _ The Emperor _ , which once held  _ The Heir/Politics _ . And maybe to scream a little on the cushions and drink boiled monster with a few shots of soda. )

As it is, though, he is on a quarantined room with four humans. Four humans who remember the game, who can turn into the uncanny valley of- into  _ Fae _ . Four humans whose future selves are roaming the ship,  _ shifted _ , pretending to be different people altogether because they make shitty plans when panicked and confused, or, in Egbert's case, panicked, confused  _ and _ coming out of a  _ fucking _ metamorphic adult molt.

It makes him take a deep breath. It makes him cause John (the  _ Emperor _ , the  _ Inheritor _ ,  _ His Noble Hurricane _ , god, what a load of pretentious  _ bullshit- _ ) to warily get ready for one of his rants. The others don't. Roxy and Jake because they don't know his tells yet, and Dave because he's still distant, clasping weakly at the blanket at his shoulders.

He doesn't rant. But he still takes a deep breath. Then another one, and then, simply, he asks:

"Egbert." He pauses, then he adds, to be sure he will be heard, a scowl already on his face "Ectobe."

John looks up to him "... Yes?" He asks, after a small pause. Karkat doesn't even snarl at his stupid dumb face and his stupid dumb glasses and his stupid dumb  _ I didn't do anything, I swear _ tone.

Karkat paces around the room, tapping his claws against the clipboard. His voice is calm, even " _ How _ do you even fuck this up so  _ badly _ ?"

It takes John a few minutes to realize that his words are not the opening note of an angry tirade, but rather, an honest question. Somehow, that hurts him more than if it was just throwing barbs, Karkat realizes, so his voice raises, with a typical cracking that is apparently common to subadult humans, instead of an Egbertian quirk: "I didn't!"

Karkat snarls, slightly. John puffs out his fins - short, stubby, and almost unnoticeable when he's like this, not even twenty five percent shifted -, and continues, voice in the realm of clicks and hisses:

"I didn't fuck things up, I barely hesitated a second to touch the door-"

"It  _ isn't  _ just that, Egbert!" He interrupts the human with a snap, and steps closer, every strand of fur on his tail and hair fluffing up "Every time- every time you try to meddle, everytime our sessions cross, bad shit happens. Every. Fucking. Time. And now you somehow  _ fucked up _ the only certainty we had-" 

In his comfortable white blanket, Dave finally speaks something. Hazy and distant, but… Aware, at least.

"Why were we even certain of it?" He mutters, tugs the blanket closer to his shoulders. He's looking at the ground, avoiding eye contact the old fashioned way, but his annoyance rings past that and his monotone voice "It'd be a bad game if it told us the end from the start. Boom, you think you won? Plot twist, baby, you didn't do shit."

He snorted. It was not a happy snort, or an amused one.

Karkat flustered. Opened and closed his mouth, trying to come up with an response to  _ that _ , an endeavor that, he was sure, would be easier if Dave wasn't back to, well, doing nothing. 

It was an stretch of time that Roxy quickly took control of.

"Okay, okay! Everyone aired out our grievances, everyone is feeling  _ really _ horrible right now-" Jake made a noise of protest against that, and she punctuated her next phrase with a slap on her bed "But! I don't know if you boys noticed, we need a plan."

"Yes, Lalonde I-" He started to speak, but she put a finger, suddenly, close against his mouth.

"Shush." She said, and he took some time to process the sentence, obeying in the seconds it took for him to understand a difference between her spoken 'o' and 'u'. 

Enough for her, apparently. She crossed her arms, and eyed the rest of them with s sigh, before smiling again.

"Look." She told them "I know how frustrating this is. But despite the powers of our Davey-boy here-" she gestured to said Davey-boy, that was running his fingers through the blanket ( Karkat didn't blame him, it really  _ was  _ a nice blanket, even for the standards of the medbay, that were ridiculously high. ), then crossed her arms again "We don't have infinite time. We need a plan, before doing anything. Afterwards you two can, I don't know, beat yourselves up?"

"I think that'd be an- an gregarious mistake, Roxy." Jake commented, and received a flippant answer of:

"Well, I'm not flipping  _ ashen _ ."

Karkat opens his mouth to tell her that  _ no, that wouldn't be flipping ashen, he was totally over Egbert Jegus be blessed _ , when said Egbert coughed.

"I have a plan." Dumb, thoughtless, idiotic, and reckless Egbert tells them.

And, because Karkat is even more dumb, thoughtless, idiotic than him, he listens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want the forbidden™ lore, you can shoot me an ask on danspectorboy.tumblr.com!


	3. Side B - Part 1

**_con·cern (/kənˈsərn/)_ **

**_Noun_ **

_ a state of anxiety and uncertainty over actual or potential problems. _

**_« ❧ »_ **

General Eric Valiant did not like this. At. All.

Sure. The military man indulged his son's love for fiction, and  _ sure _ , he and Wander had often used some trashy science fiction movie or book as an excuse to hang out and complain about petty things. These two facts, he'd concede easily, maybe left just a bit embarrassed by them.

Hell. He could concede this much, too, could concede that,  _ yes sir, as footage, eyewitnesses, collateral damage, and the ominous message a large part of the human population received prove, aliens are real and one of them wants a diplomatic meeting while the other just attacked huge populational centers, only being foiled by the first aliens and sheer luck _ . 

It was a bitter pill to swallow, sure, but a practical, necessary one. The sooner as he accepted it, the better, and besides the worry about how they'd fare in combat if things went sideways, there were very little emotional beats that he had to be concerned about. He had steadied himself after a few hours dedicated to mechanically doing paperwork, and listening to the Ewyan Invite, as the message had already been nicknamed, on loop.

And it was easy. A little more real, with every second that passed of the sing-song voice somewhere between baritone and tenor speaking softly in his ears.

Then his brain caught up with the  _ Return Of The Five Human Adolescents _ part of it.

Adolescents.  _ Teenagers _ . Caught up in an attack. The clinical language caught him up, and tripped his reasoning. For once, he felt as if he had been betrayed by his own mind, his own anxiety- 

Oh.  _ Hello, drama phase, what are you doing in my professional life? _ He sarcastically asked himself, moving a hand to rub at his temple, putting his reading glasses down with the other as the softly spoken voice repeated, once again, too politely for the words being said:

“...  _ Best regards, and a wish for your lives to not be bothered by the Big Empty Fucking Nameless Thing _ ...” and here it paused, the voice that seemed a mix of weirdly american accents and something that, quite likely, was literally alien in it’s chirps and clicks being overrided for a deep breath and long exhalation that made Eric follow along with his own lungs, before finishing, pleasant and yet so oddly  _ smug  _ in its drawl of the  _ wan _ part “ _... The Intergalactic Ewyan Empire of Epr’il Waenerd Kattas-Yorond Un Svocall. _ ”

The alien title announced the end of the loop, and, after a few seconds of muffled nothingness, the re-start of it, with the rising, confident “ _ As per the orders of- _ ”

Eric took off his earbuds before the titles of their emperor could be announced, and, with a sigh of acknowledgement and annoyance, rubbed his temples,  _ again,  _ and his headache didn’t get less painful.

_ Lovely. _

He put his reading glasses on, again. Stared at the mass of legal busywork that, he knew, would be cancelled before the ink on it was even dry. Perhaps before he even finished writing his name on it, truth be told. He stared at the clock above the door to his office, that, helpfully, warned him he had worked three hours of overtime already.

Then he took his glasses off, slipped them in his breast pocket after a light scrubbing with a cloth at the lenses, and locked the office, scuttling down corridors by looking at his phone, keep the call button over the contact of one dear, old, respected man named Johann Valiant.

His father. someone who clearly thought of himself as the world greatest practical trickster, who had given Eric advanced lessons in dad humor long before his grandson Harry Valiant had even been a possibility.

Also the one man who had given him many reasons to not put his phone on speaker at work, as his booming voice, that, as always, was out of breath from either laughing too much or a lifetime of fragile lungs, probably both, greeted him, with enthusiasm befitting someone who should be forty, maybe sixty, years younger “ _ Ricky, my best son- and don’t even start with that groan, you are the only one that bothered in existing- did you know good young prick Davvy Jones’ niece packs a mean kick, I mean, she sure as jack showed the boys across the street who actually was the bee’s knees with Harry and- _ ”

Eric gave a sigh of relief “They are fine, then? Not scared with, ah, the aliens?” He silently cursed his sci-fi phase that made it so embarrassing to be saying  _ aliens  _ out loud in such a serious tone.

His father let out a guffaw- and then a series of coughs that Eric tried, and failed, to not be concerned about, despite the fact that he knew well it had been a thing since long before he was even born. It just always sounded wrong, to him, for his father to be rendered breathless by the things he most loved to do.

“ _ Scared? _ ” His father’s voice, incredulous and slightly static with bad connection as it was, still felt relieving to Eric, even when calling him by the nickname that he had long outgrown “ _ Ricky, these kids couldn’t be more pumped- they spent the whole afternoon talking about their ‘martian manslaughters’ and their ‘green lamps’ after a good game of soccer to burn off their energy. _ ”

Eric sighed “Dad, that joke stopped working when I discovered your vintage collection of alien comics-”

“ _ Can’t blame an old, innocent man for trying.”  _ The devil in shape of a gigglemug who was likely wearing a sweater along a head of pure white hair told him from the phone, somehow managing to pass the message of a wink, even before he added “ _ Winky twinkling wink. _ ”

Eric, against all his principles, laughed, short and a bit sharp-pitched.

“ _ Now, that’s my Ricky. _ ” His father’s voice sounded softer, more tender, as he said so. Then he broke it by adding “ _ Now professionally relieving his trekkie days for the wonders of very serious smarty big boy pants job- _ ”

“ _ Dad _ .” He said, in somehow a perfect mimicry of his own son’s parentally exasperated voice. His dad softened again.

“ _ But seri-”  _ He paused, remembering the Two Dollars Serious Familiar Bet of Ninety One Till Today And Tomorrow and switching his words “ _ But earnestly, don’t worry Ricky. It’ll be fine. The kids will have a sleepover, probably talk until late in the night, and tomorrow Davvy Jones will drive their adorably sleep-deprived-and-trying-to-hide-it faces home.” _

“Be merciful and don’t prank their coffees for once in their life.”

“ _ That’s insulting, back in my day, they didn’t call me Mean Old Lad- _ ” Eric talked to his father until he reached his car. Said his goodbyes.

And then drove off.

**_« ❧ »_ **

Cooking wasn’t exactly a chore Eric was fond of. It wasn’t that he was bad at it, or anything of the kind. His cooking was decent, serviceable - Nothing gourmet, or the kind of cooking that would be spoken around his friends for how good it was- but, at least, it also wouldn’t get badmouthed.

Which was why, when the doorbell rang, he knew  _ exactly _ who would be dropping by for sudden dinners. Wander, after all,\was the Ampora that dropped by for sudden  _ lunches _ .

“Shrimp, I must say that I have no chicken nuggets-” He opened the door, already talking with a small smile on his face.

And Alpheus Ampora, bearer of the now ironic nickname of “Shrimp”, smug-ass big fish out of the pond, and consumer of chicken nuggets and questionable food, smiled back “Well, I brought sushi.”

“Roadside sushi?”

“Effin’ Course, Eric.” Alpheus raised an eyebrow “I don’t enter your abode without appropriate offerings.”

The taller man - by gargantuan two centimeters, as they had measured earlier in their life - blinked “I can’t tell if that was an insult or passive-aggressiveness. Well played.”

Alpheus smiled, and stepped inside, dimples in full display between the two large scars on his face “Both.”

Eric snorted at his old friend, and closed the door behind him after giving him a light slap on the back, guiding him by the corridors. Without a pause, he replied:

“I’ll add your culinary skills, for that. Unless you fancy watching me curse at beef”

Alpheus retorted “Oh, you mean watch you try to talk at the meat the same way you talked at your superiors,  _ Ricky _ ?”

“I was thinking more of the way you try to give drills to the animals at the zoo, actually, Ally.”

“Now, now, those otters really show potential for bein’ marines- Why, they may even show more shootin’ skills than you.”

Eric pulled out a chair for Alpheus, and re-started the fire on the stove “Aiming so low? Where’s your ambition, friend?”

Alpheus shrugged. Took seat on the chair his friend had pulled for him. And then, reluctantly, admitted “... That ain’t really my focus now, y’know?”

“... Let me guess, the aliens? I didn’t think you’d be too bothered, but I guess you  _ are  _ Wander’s brother-”

“My best friend’s son was kidnapped. Apparently accidentally.” Alpheus interrupted, casually, leaving Eric without knowing exactly what to say.

“Oh.”

Except  _ oh _ . That was always appropriate, even in the most awkward of situations.

“So yeah, the aliens.” He shrugged. And the box of roadside sushi he had been carrying down on the table.

Eric scrambled his brain, and, carefully, asked:

“Kelvin Vantas’ boy? Karkat Liev?” Kelvin Vantas was someone with whom Eric shared the post of best friend with. And yet, despite that mutually shared title, neither of them had ever been able to be properly introduced. Something always came up when they had a date put down for an encounter, or, more often, they simply didn’t share any free time that would make it possible to meet, in the first time.

“Yeah. ‘im.”

“Oh.” He repeated. Good old  _ Oh _ , never failing to carry him through anything, even awkward talks about how his friend’s friend’s son had been kidnapped by aliens. On accident.

Alpheus gave him another shrug.

“So, Eric,” He asked, carefully “Got any information my half-assed rank can make me be able to ignore the confidential part to allow you to tell me?”

“... Sadly, no. Not even information your ‘half-assed rank’ wouldn’t be able to ignore the confidential part.” He told the discharged marine, and winced “... We haven’t even got anything properly confidential yet, truth be told.”

“That one transmission?”

He rubbed the back of his neck. Mumbled “... And because we were caught just as off-guard by them as any random schmuck on the internet. Right now, the conspiracy theorists have exactly as much information as the government.”

“Oh,  _ lovely _ .” Alpheus grumbled. Paused, and sniffed the air “... Almost as lovely as that beef you’re cookin’. The ones I’m pretty sure are burning, right now.”

Eric looked down at the stove. “ _ Oh _ , Fu-”

Before his old and reliable  _ Oh _ could get an accompaniment, Alpheus laughed, and then, amused, said “... Well, move aside. Let me pay back for wastin’ your time, I guess.”

And Eric moved aside, his annoyance and headache now more petty than seriously concerned, at least for the moment. He was successfully distracted, and it made Alpheus smile just a little bit more.

His beef was unburnt, and went well with roadside sushi and soda.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh s n a p ya boy dan is actually working on this one. damn. im honored, your honor, i have a legitimate big boy project now, and im committed to it.


End file.
